Kwik Krimes (8 page)

“Right-o, then. I’ll be off. Mr. Jackson should be back from Cambridge any moment.” She closed the door almost reverently behind her. He went back to work. The next second he was lost in the world of quantum physics.

He heard the light click of the door handle, though. His remaining senses had become fine-tuned. Including his brain. Still one of the best in the world.

“Jackson?” he asked, not looking up from the screen. He had been waiting impatiently for his secretary’s return. There had been a flood of correspondence since the Nobel Prize had been announced.

“Not Jackson,” said a voice behind him.

He spun the wheelchair in surprise to see that the intruder had come in through the French windows.

“Mason. My dear old friend.” His face managed the ghost of a smile.

“Hello, Woodson,” the man said. They were about the same age, but Mason was still in the full bloom of health. He looked down at the shrunken cripple in the chair, his head held steady in a cradle, a great bellows behind the chair making an almost-human sigh as it breathed in and out for him.

“I gather congratulations are in order,” Dr. Mason said.

“Thank you. A great honor. I feel quite humbled by it.”

“As well you should,” Dr. Mason said, his big shape coming between Woodson and the sunlight. “Getting all the credit for years of shared research.”

“Of course you deserve some of the credit,” Woodson said. “I’m going to make that clear in my speech.”

“Some of the credit?” Mason’s face was flushed now. “It should have been my prize, Woodson, not yours. You won it with the sympathy vote.”

Woodson’s clear gaze held the other man’s eyes. “Not true, Mason, and you know it. We did the initial research together, but I went on.”

“I took a different tack.”

“The road less traveled?” Woodson asked. “And that has made all the difference?”

“The difference of a million pounds.”

“Oh, so it’s the money that comes with the prize that irks you?”

“I need that money, Woodson.”

“My own lifestyle is not exactly cheap to maintain,” Woodson said. “All these gizmos just to keep me alive.”

“To keep you alive,” Mason repeated. “It must be terrifying to be so helpless.”

Woodson swiveled the chair as Mason circled around him.

“One tug, Woodson,” he said. “One pull of the plug and you’re gone.” His hands reached for the back of the wheelchair.

“Get away from me.” Woodson swung the chair to avoid him.

Mason laughed. “I don’t think you can run away from me, old chap. I’ve wanted you dead for years. Now I’m damned if you’re going to get that prize.”

“I’ll sound the alarm for my secretary.”

“I happen to know he’s not back yet,” Mason said. “I’ve planned this perfectly. Everyone thinks I’m in France. And, as you notice, no fingerprints.”

Woodson realized now what had been bothering him. The man wore latex gloves. One gloved hand reached behind the wheelchair.

“So simple. Disconnect computer. Then I pull out the breathing tube and you stop breathing. So long, old chap. Brilliant brain. Such a pity.” He gave a violent yank, looked back once, and then slipped out through the French doors.

Woodson fought rising panic. Had to tell someone. Couldn’t telephone without his computer. Couldn’t open the door. No way to communicate. His eyes scanned the room. Less than a minute. Only his brain to help him, if he worked fast. The robot arm shot from the computer to grab a book. It fell to the floor, then another…

Inspector Hadley looked around the room. Too many books for his taste. The walls were lined with them.

“You don’t think it was an accident then?” he asked the young man and the housekeeper who stood together, ashen faced.

“But someone disconnected the computer,” the secretary said. “He couldn’t do that himself.”

“Who found him?”

“I did, sir,” Mrs. Broad said.

“And the room looked like this?”

“He was facing the wall,” Mrs. Broad said. “There were several books lying on the floor.”

“Where are they now?”

“I picked them up,” she said.

“What books were they?”

“Nothing special. Just random books.”

“Did he often leave books lying on the floor?”

“Oh, no. He was quite meticulous,” the housekeeper said. “He always wanted books put away when he was done with them.”

“Can you remember which books they were?” the inspector asked.

“I don’t know I paid much attention.”

“Try to remember, Mrs. Broad,” Jackson said.

“Do you think he might have left them as a message?” the inspector asked.

“If they were out, they were out for a reason,” Jackson said.

Mrs. Broad scanned the bookcase and pulled out a cookbook.
One-Pot Dishes
.

“A cookbook?” The inspector sounded incredulous.

“And this one.”

“His own book,
String Theory
,” Jackson said.

“And this.”

“
Moby Dick
?”

“And some Russian book.”

“
Anna Karenina
? This makes no sense.” The inspector shook his head. “They must have fallen during a struggle.”

“Oh, and this.” Mrs. Broad put
Northanger Abbey
on the table.

“They have nothing in common,” the inspector said. “Jane Austen and
String Theory
?”

Jackson stared at them. “What order were they in on the floor?”

The housekeeper thought hard, then arranged them on the table. Jackson wrote down the titles. “Look, sir,” he said, excitedly. “He’s named his killer.”

The inspector read:

Moby Dick

Anna Karenina

String Theory

One-Pot Dishes

Northanger Abbey

“And?” the inspector asked.

“Mason.” He pointed to the first letters. “Donald Mason, Dr. Woodson’s arch rival. He wanted that Nobel Prize.”

Rhys Bowen is the
New York Times
best-selling author of two historical mystery series: the Molly Murphy Mysteries, set in early 1900s New York City, and the lighter Royal Spyness stories, featuring a penniless minor royal in 1930s England. Her books have been nominated for every major mystery award and have won thirteen to date, including Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Awards. A transplanted Brit, Rhys now divides her time between California and Arizona.

Jay Brandon

I
t was a small room, and he was a small guy. I didn’t have to do anything to make him feel trapped except be in there with him, towering over him. I just had to put a hand on his shoulder and ease him down into the chair at the table, cutting off most of the room without trying.

“You know what to do,” Lieutenant Owsley had said to me a minute ago, and I did. Get the confession. Make sure the details were right. Details only someone who’d been in the apartment would know. Owsley had let me skim the initial report, and there were details enough. Pretty little secretary, neat little apartment. Nicely laid out kitchen, lunch for two, cooking things still on the stove, a simple meal. And the bed nicely made in the bedroom only a few feet away. Her lunch date hadn’t shown up, apparently. This burglar had. He hadn’t expected to find anyone home, and by the time he left no one was. Just the pretty little secretary on the kitchen floor, her neatness spoiled by the pool of blood around her.

“You know her?” Owsley asked.

I shook my head.

“Worked in the building right across the street.”

“Maybe I’ve seen her then.” I shrugged.

Owsley had said something else to me too, just before I’d gone into the interview room. “We need this.” He’d stretched to whisper in my ear. I’d just nodded. The code was clear: he was sure, intuitively or whatever, this was the guy, but there might not be enough evidence to convict him without a good confession.

He said something else, just before he left. “We’ll be down the hall. Out of earshot.”

The suspect knew what that meant, too.

We had more modern interview rooms, but this called for old school: scarred metal table, cold metal chair, outdated equipment. I started the interview a little differently, fiddling with the recording equipment and then saying, “Ah, the hell with it.” When I turned back to the guy, he knew. We weren’t recording this session. I just looked at him for a long minute, watching sweat appear on his balding forehead. He wiped his mouth, looking up at me from the edge of the chair. “You were there,” I said. He shook his head. “You think we don’t know, just because you wiped the place clean? That shows what a pro you are. You weren’t so careful when you hit another apartment in the same building a month ago. And somebody saw you there last week.”

That wasn’t in the report, but I figured it was the detail most likely to get a reaction, and I was right. His eyes got big as open windows. “I was just there looking at an empty apartment. To rent. Felons gotta live someplace too.”

I just let him think about that bad story while I began writing his confession. He looked over my shoulder. “I didn’t. I didn’t hit her. She hit her head on the countertop.” I backtracked in the confession to say she’d slipped, smiling inside. Hit head on the table edge. The burglar wasn’t contradicting anything now. I slipped in the perfect details: lavendar panties, the gold watch from her jewelry drawer.

Owsley came in to take it from me. Looked at the blank signature line, then at me. I just looked back. The guy was pressed back against the wall now that there were two cops in the room. He’d sign.

Owsley nodded as he read. “Table edge. Good detail. He said countertop, but you’re right, it was the table edge. We found blood. Sure you didn’t know her? That’s funny, because I saw the two of you at lunch one day. Little out-of-the-way Mexican place. I started to come over and say hi, but it looked like you were having a pretty intense discussion.”

I sensed people on the other side of the mirrored glass. Started thinking, didn’t say anything.

“So I thought of you, especially after I saw the gift she’d bought. It was in the bedroom. Did you not get that far?” His partner came in, handed him a large gift box, kept his eyes on me. Owsley opened it. A robe. Plush. Burgundy. I looked down at it, rubbed the rich texture of the fabric, and saw my initials on the pocket.

“Nice robe,” Owsley said. “Must have set her back half a week’s pay. A girl trying to hold on to her man, when he was ready to dump her. Or wanting more than he was willing to give her, breaking up his marriage and costing him half his pension.”

Owsley sighed. “Or maybe she just loved him and wanted to do something nice for him. The initials weren’t enough. Neither was the table set for two. She was expecting somebody, not a burglar. But now we’ve got enough, I think. Details that weren’t in the report. The table edge. The fact the watch was gold. The report doesn’t mention either of those.”

I was the biggest guy in the room, but there were two of them. Now three, counting the burglar. And we were on DVD. Now that I was paying attention, I could hear the faint hum of the backup system.

Lieutenant Owsley draped the robe over my shoulders. She must’ve gotten it at a big and tall men’s shop, because it hung nicely on my shoulders and fell almost to my ankles.

“Nice fit,” Owsley said.

Jay Brandon is the award-winning author of
Fade the Heat, Executive Privilege,
the Chris Sinclair series of legal thrillers, and more than a dozen other novels. His story “A Jury of His Peers” appeared in
The Best American Mystery Stories 2010.
A pair of new novels by Jay have recently been published,
The Jetty
(2012) and
The Real History
(February 2013). Visit him at
JayBrandon.com
.

R. Thomas Brown

H
ap Callahan walked through the saloon doors of Cowboy Coffee, shaking his head at the lassos in the logo. Seemed every place he went these days tried to make you feel like you were at a theme park, not next door to a James Avery in yet another strip mall filling up suburban space and giving the local commuters a place to spend their money.